Scott Bertram (3:28)

What is the role of beauty in a Hillsdale member school in the life and formation of a student?

Monica Dix (3:36)

Well, if you are listening to this, you probably have heard the word beauty come along with truth and goodness. And in a Hillsdale school, we can't ignore that third transcendental. We have to pay attention to beauty. It matters. And to do this well in a member school, I think that we have to live it out. We have to embody it. So that means how I behave as a teacher, how my classroom is set up, the art that I show my students, it's not all beautiful. Sometimes we're looking at art for other reasons. Some art, especially in the 20th century, we're not teaching about beauty in that case, but we are teaching about human response. And humans respond to beauty. We want more of it. So the more of it we can get visually and even with the way things sound and feel in a school, the closer we can bring our students to goodness and truth, because beauty attracts us to those things.

Scott Bertram (4:37)

Yeah. So how does beauty relate to truth and goodness? And why is it included in those big three transcendentals?

Monica Dix (4:45)

The way I like to think about it, and of course, I didn't invent this idea, and I'm not a philosopher, so philosophy professors out there, please email me later. Plato's ladder, this idea that we're climbing these rungs, the ladder of love, we're climbing these rungs to reach this ultimate perfection. And beauty is one of those things that leads us up the ladder that draws us. When we see something beautiful, we want to investigate it, we want to know it more. And it can be a big disappointment. If something looks attractive on the outside and then isn't. Sir Roger Scruton said, we are drawn to attractive people because we assume that they're going to be nice. When we find out they're not, it's a big disappointment. I'm paraphrasing. And that mechanism of being lured in. And then if it's true beauty, there is goodness behind it, and then that fulfillment is. That's the thing that we're encountering through beauty. We're encountering goodness, we're encountering truth. And those are things we need as human beings.

Scott Bertram (5:53)

We ask about beauty in schools in two different ways. The first way, the role of beauty at say, a Hillsdale member school in the life and formation of a student.

Monica Dix (6:05)

So think about what a student's day is like. They may be, you know, waking up a little earlier than feels comfortable. And they arrive in this place, if it's not welcoming, that's not good. They're not going to give their best, they're going to resist. They might be doing that anyway. But a beautiful building, a welcoming entrance, welcoming people who are speaking kindly. So that beauty in our speech is important too. Even things like the sounds of footsteps in the hall and the cafeteria, things like that, we have to consider are affecting us. And the more beautiful we can make those things, the more beautiful we can make those things, the more access we have to students hearts. And that's what they came to us for, to have their hearts formed in a good way.

Scott Bertram (6:52)

And what about the role of beauty for teachers and for administrators in working on that big thing? We talk about school culture.

Monica Dix (7:02)

Well, students spend a lot of time in the school, but we know there are some other people who spend even more time in the school building. And it's not that we live there, but we do live there. So I think that it's important to consider that that's for us as well. We are in this building together. And that's everyone who's in the building, not just even visitors, people who work there in any capacity. And if it's beautiful, we will all reap the rewards of that. We will all have our hearts warmed. Even if we never sit down in a classroom and take notes, that will still affect us. And as administrators or as a teacher working in collaboration with other teachers and administrators, we're the ones who have control over that or the most control in the building at the moment. The architect also has something to say, right? So that happens before we walk into the building. But we have the most control in a day to day way. And that can really be as simple as the beauty of sound of our speech, the art that we hang on the walls, the books that we read. Even I was so excited to see at the conference this new golden thread and the illustrations and the art that was selected for this. It's gorgeous, it's beautiful. I can't wait to get my hands on it.

Scott Bertram (8:21)

I've talked with other people about this and so you're a good person to ask because teachers can't necessarily do much about the architecture of the building in which they're teaching, but they do have their classroom. And we've talked about making it a beautiful place, a welcoming place for students. Are there some. I want to say simple, but are there some suggestions or tips to making a classroom beautiful for students?

Monica Dix (8:45)

I think we can approach it this way. If you're a classroom teacher and it is your space and you have some choices to make about it, you can think about what you would like in a classroom, right? So you can maybe do something with the lighting. If you have overhead lights and a window, maybe you can find a way to arrange your furniture that you're using that natural light, and you can feature that and maybe turn off those overhead lights or supplement it with some nice warm incandescent lamp, some corners of the room, that sort of thing. Choosing the art, placing it carefully, all the things that would make you feel welcome in the room probably would also help your students feel welcome. I even think things like traffic flow in the classroom and planning for that. And as an art teacher, maybe my students are moving around more in my classroom than in others during the course of my teaching. So I do really give a lot of thought to that. It's not that it would think of it as visually beautiful to watch them moving around, but I want them to feel like it's graceful and that they can flow and get what they need from this shelf and move over here. So I think those are some of the things to consider even in your small domain as a classroom teacher.

Scott Bertram (10:00)

Monica Dix is with us. Art teacher at Naples Classical Academy in Florida. Part of Naples Classical Academy mission is to train the mind and improve the hearts of young people through a classical education with instruction in the principles of moral character. So how do you contribute to that development of moral character? And how do we do this in the larger context of the art world today?

Monica Dix (10:24)

Wow. So to be. To even strive to be a virtuous, a moral person is a big, big task. It should rightly consume your life. It should enter into all of your decisions. But when you have students literally and figuratively watching you and you see the results, they'll imitate things that you do, even things you weren't consciously expecting them to do. You. You realize the weight of that, and that can be a good thing. It can push me when I've got a decision, a decision to make into the correct decision, because I realize that it's going to form someone else. But of course, then it also forms me. Every right decision, every right behavior, every beautiful choice, it helps the next one come a little more easily.

Scott Bertram (11:14)

If you had a substantial budget or a large budget, how would you recommend using it to support beauty. And on the other hand, if not small budget, what can be done?

Monica Dix (11:25)

So with a small budget, I realize that's probably where most of us are. I would say, you know, just you have to think of what small purchase could you make or what smaller thing could you create that wouldn't be expensive. One of the things that I've done for my upper school art students is, is and I got grant money to do this was to buy plaster casts of beautiful sculpture. So we have the head of Giuliano de Medici, sculpted by Michelangelo, in our classroom. And I did purchase that for the purpose of drawing it in a way to sort of stand in for portrait drawing and having a model. But it serves this other purpose too. It's beautiful Scott sculpture and it sits on a shelf even when we're not working on drawing that we think, well, art's expensive, framing is expensive, but there are other ways to bring beautiful works of art into your classroom. And the cast, although it does cost money, it's a more affordable, high impact purchase. So I have a few things like that I bought that are they're art copies of art, and I leave them out. Another thing I do is I make a still life, right? So flowers and fruit. And we'll draw it and I'll teach about drawing and sort of the technical things. But it's beautiful and it stays. So even when we're finished drawing, I might move it, but it can stay out in my classroom. And we all just have this enjoyment of having that moment of contemplation. I think students, without even realizing they are doing that, they'll just zone out. Why not zone out? Instead of a blank wall on a beautiful painting or even a print of a beautiful painting. So prints are another. Another option. And even original art, that's good, you know, that isn't expensive. So it doesn't have to be master artwork. But if you know someone who makes art, even if you can't buy their painting, borrow it, ask an artist in your local area if they can, you know, they can hang a beautiful painting in your classroom just for the school year, then they can have it back. So I think there are ways of solving the budget problem. Now, if you had an unlimited budget, well, I would start with the architecture. That would be the first thing. Even if it meant you had to wait to hang art on the walls. I think that the architecture is really, it's such a powerful message. There's really no ignoring it. Now, once you're in a classroom, you aren't seeing the outside of the building, you do have to focus on that as well. So with an unlimited budget, I really think it would be. It would be the building, and then the rest could happen more organically. It seems that we're always in such a hurry to build buildings. Everyone seems to be noticing how long it's taking to finish the graduate school, which is going to be amazing, and I get that. But a cathedral, 600 years? Well, you know, the result was good. So I understand. There's just this logistical thing about building in a hurry, and maybe that's not going to be a possibility. And then also with an unlimited budget, I would have visiting artists come and do talks. You know, I Don't get me started.

Scott Bertram (14:35)

I do want to get started on talking a bit about work inside the classroom. How is teaching art in a classical school different from teaching art in a conventional school?

Monica Dix (14:46)

This is a good question. So I grew up in an era where I was in a classical school, but it wasn't called that. It wasn't. No one needed to remark on it. That's also dating me, I realize. But the thing that's really different, that students and parents will notice right away, especially in art class, is that art class is not a party. It's not just playing with materials, and there's work involved, and there's a goal. And it's not to pass the time or even the small goal of making something that you could, you know, something pretty that you could hang on your wall. It's not about that in our classrooms. It's more about the process, about what's happening in the mind, in the heart, in the soul. I would argue with that student. As they're working on a drawing, as they're reading a text, as they're singing a song, it's not about the product or the result. And so that's a big difference. I think in a. In a conventional art class, if it's not about the product, it's about the process just being fun. And. And we all know that to make something beautiful takes a lot of hard work and a long, long time, usually.

Scott Bertram (15:55)

How can you work in the classroom to train students not just to see beauty, but to desire beauty?

Monica Dix (16:04)

I think this is one of the hardest things to grasp. And part of it is because you don't have to train most people. I think that if you can give them, it's not training. You give them a space where they can contemplate and relax and have true leisure, not just downtime, their brains will start to look around In a different way, they'll start to notice different things. I was in a Montessori school teaching toddlers. I don't like to call it teaching because Montessori is a different approach. It's not quite that, but Dr. Montessori developed her ideas watching what toddlers would do in a room with no toys, no things. They would find pebbles and crumbs and make things out of them and play with them. So if you just let children be, they'll start that process. Now, we all know you can't continue to let them be because that's Lord of the Flies. But if you can get that moment, give them some quiet, some space, they'll start the process, and then that's where you can come in and lead them along. And I think doing it with something beautiful and is a great way our brains are wired to move toward something that's attractive. We say the word attractive. It means to magnetize and, you know, move towards something, but it also means something beautiful. There's a reason for that. We move toward the beautiful. So as our students are moving toward, in their minds, this beautiful painting, for example, they will be more open to listening about how it was made, why it was made, who made it, what period of history it came from, what it depicts in history, for example. So it's just a hook. It's a way of getting them. Sometimes it's just a way of getting them started with the rest.

Scott Bertram (17:52)

Let's talk about teaching upper school students a bit. If there's an upper school student who does not have plans to be a professional artist, what's the motivation? Why should he or she study art history, take studio art classes?

Monica Dix (18:06)

That's a great question, too. And because I was. I was that art kid. I wasn't the kid who was annoyed by having to take a drawing class. Although I did have to learn how to draw in high school. I have lots of those students, and it's really okay now. Their hesitation comes from different places. Sometimes they're just worried they're not going to be good at it. But who knows what they're good at when they're 12 or 13 years old? I mean, it's. You're still figuring that out. So I don't really even judge whether they're good at it or not. I just want them to be in the room, work through the process, try things out. Now, if there is someone who's done that for a while and they're showing interest and skill and they've developed their skill and they want to study Further, really, it's a case by case thing. And I would be really careful before I would say to someone, you should go to art school. I would even say, let's talk about what kind of university or college education you want, because art should be part of something larger. And without getting into the recent history of higher education in art. The art school I went to was classical. It didn't have that word in its name. And I was probably the last class to actually have that education. After that, it was. Well, it fell apart. I don't want to complain, but I'm not going to encourage a parent to send their kid to art school after they've spent all this time at our school. It just doesn't make sense. But if they wanted to develop further in art, I would think about, how did people do this in the past? So I had a classical art school. Many of my classes were set up in the atelier fashion where we would work alongside our professor, just physically alongside. We were just running to catch up, always. Or if they're really. If it's a really specific thing they're into, I would say look for an apprenticeship or an internship or something that's really in that thing. If you want to make prints or paint or sculpt and you don't, you're not looking for this wider education. Almost as if we're looking at making art as a trade. So I would also say possibly that's something you could do if you have great skills in art. There are trades that use that. And I even heard about a new school in one of the Carolinas, and I don't remember the name, but it's a school for building arts. So they teach architecture and wood carving and stone masonry and all the things that go into making beautiful buildings. And maybe that would be a place I would send a student. But just to say, to go to. I can't drop names about art schools, but just to go to what we think of as like a big art school that is a recognizable name. Not necessarily. Yeah, I think it would probably be too easy, actually, after our education in a Hillsdale member school.

Scott Bertram (20:48)

What about grades? What do you say to parents who are curious about how you're going to grade a student's work? Maybe one who is not quote unquote, naturally gifted, naturally good at art. By the way, I drew something for my son recently and he laughed and he said, no, now do it for real. And that actually was my best guess at it. So I feel bad about it.

Monica Dix (21:11)

Well, if he was your teacher, maybe he would say, well, let's do that again, take it from the top. But I think that maybe there's a place where we're going to judge the product of the art making process. But I don't think we're there. We're K through 12. I think that can happen even. Maybe even after college. It's about working the process, learning what the process is. Some of that's technical, but a lot of it is mental and social. Even dealing with your own resistance to noticing a mistake? Well, the resistance isn't to noticing it. The resistance is to fixing it after you've noticed it. If that. If you can change that, you can change not only all your work in art class, but all your classes. Right. If you can notice mistakes and then just dig in and fix them, that would be it. Now, my own grading. I think about the process. Did the student do the steps? The results may vary. They will not all have beautiful drawings. I've graded. There have been A's on drawings that I wouldn't call beautiful. Probably the student. Students always are the worst judges. They always think their work is terrible when it's not. Sometimes they think it's great when it's not. But I think that I look at the process. So I watch them while they're working and I take notes if I have to. If I can't really keep track. If there's many steps or a lot of students or it's a really long project. I give them midpoint grades and I think about, are they listening to the step part of the instruction? And another thing I do sometimes is I withhold like I'm doing a demo. But I don't show them my finished work. So I don't say, we're going to make a drawing and I want you to make it look like this. I say, I want you to do this. And then I don't show them anything else. And sometimes they'll sit there and say, Mrs. Dix, what's it supposed to look like when it's done? I don't know. I don't even know what mine's going to look like. Right. It might be terrible, but I'm going to do the steps and you're going to do the steps and we're going to work together. And I'll work side by side with them that way, too. I try to approach it like that.

Scott Bertram (23:14)

Monica Dix is art teacher at Naples Classical Academy in Naples, Florida. Talking about forming a student's affection of beauty in art. Monica, thanks so much for joining us. Here on the Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast.

Monica Dix (23:28)

This was lovely, Mr. Bertram. Thank you so much.

Scott Bertram (23:31)

I'm Scott Bertram. We invite you to like us on Facebook Search for Hillsdale College K12 classical education. You also can follow us on Instagram hillsdalek12. That's hillsdalek12 on Instagram. Thank you for listening to The Hillsdale College K12 classical education podcast, Part B of the Hillsdale College Podcast Network. More at Podcast Hillsdale. Edu or wherever you get your audio.